The Snack Social: a Clean Scoop
By Patricia Racine
August 2026
No summer day is complete without a nice cold, creamy, and sweet cone of ice cream. But when you read the ingredients on most pints they look more like a chemistry experiment than a food. Ice cream is a simple food, in my opinion, and when companies add industrial food dyes and carrageenan, they really come close to ruining a good thing.
We are fortunate that New England is home to some top tier, clean label creameries and in honor of the midsummer month of August here is a list of the closest ones to us and one-day trip-worthy place.
1. SoCo Creamery (Great Barrington) sources all of their fluid dairy from Kingdom Creamery in northern Vermont and when asked they can give you explicit details about where the rest of their ingredients come from, including the names of the harvesters. In addition, most of their mix-ins are made from scratch in-house, including their cookie dough, brownies, caramel, and marshmallows.
2. Gran-Val Scoop (Granville) is more than a regular ice cream shop; it is a local experience with a live petting zoo. They make all their ice cream with their milk on-site and in small batches. and hand mixed in inclusions; they run an impressive 32 flavors so there is something for everyone. You can even bring home a hand-packed true half gallon which is more than you get from the grocery store.
3. Flayvors of Cook Farm (Hadley) is the epitome of a classic New England farmstead ice cream shop right down to the swinging benches near the pasture where you can watch their herd graze. This family-run creamery is extremely community driven and they use local ingredients whenever possible, like the renowned Hadley asparagus in their Hadley Grass ice cream.
4. Strafford Organic Creamery (Strafford, VT) is the gold standard for old-fashioned ice cream made without stabilizers, gums, and artificial ingredients. This is quality small batch ice cream made with milk from a small Guernsey herd that grazes organic pastures. And, fun fact, this is the town that musician Noah Kahan hails from.
5. Häagen-Dazs (nationwide) is the only big commercial brand that has a completely clean ingredient list focused on real cream, milk, cane sugar, and egg yolks without any artificial flavors or synthetic emulsifiers. And even though everything about this brand screams European company, including their name, they were founded in the Bronx.
The story of ice cream starts in the ancient world when emperors would serve their guests a sweet treat made from snow, honey, and fruits–basically, all natural snow cones. In the Middle Ages, Arab chefs added sweetened cream to the snow cones to make Sharbat, or basically ancient sherbet. In the 1600s Florentine chefs in the Medici court discovered that adding coarse salt to ice dropped its temperature low enough to freeze liquids solid, leading to the development of gelato. It was soon after that the first gelato shop opened in Paris, bringing ice cream to the regular people, and thus starting our love affair with the treat. Once the recipe crossed the pond to America, we put our own spin on it and turned it into the product we know and love today. The hand-cranked churn was developed in 1843 Philadelphia by Nancy Johnson; 1851 saw the first large scale commercial factory open in Baltimore, and at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the cone was created out of necessity when a vendor ran out of dishes.
By the mid-20th century, the product we were enjoying at the turn of the century had been industrialized with the additions of artificial colors, flavors, and cheap chemical stabilizers to extend shelf life and mimic natural creaminess. But luckily, we are coming full circle back to small, local creameries and focusing on real, clean, farm fresh ingredients. If any of this is important to you, make sure to do your research because not all creameries, even the small ones, are actually using clean ingredients. You might be surprised at which ones are not as clean as you think.
